Legislative Consequences of Black Disfranchisement in the US South, 1880-1915

• In Event: Institutions and Representation in State Legislative Politics

Abstract

The restriction of black voting rights in the U.S. South in the decades following Reconstruction is perhaps the greatest instance of democratic backsliding in American history. While the effectiveness of disfranchisement in eliminating black voting is well understood, less attention has been afforded to the consequences of these reforms for legislative representation. In this study, I draw on newly collected roll call data from the state legislatures of the former Confederacy to explore these consequences. Using existing methods to scale these roll call votes, I first characterize the main dimensions of legislative conflict across Southern state legislatures. I then demonstrate that widespread black disfranchisement is associated with large conservative shifts in ideological representation in highly black areas, relative to white areas. This result holds across states with varying degrees of party competition and across different types of disfranchising reform. In addition to providing new understanding of the first-order consequences of one of the most significant events in American political history, these results affirm the strength of the relationship between the franchise and public policy and provide new historical and quantitative backdrop for the broad political science literature on the “Solid South."

Author

• Michael Olson, Harvard University